As Chip and Dan Heath write, “defining moments are social,” and are “strengthened because we share them with others.” If you find yourself sitting in a packed auditorium, and people around you raise their hand to take a pledge, there’s a good chance you will, too. Many of the community members in attendance joined in.īoth Senior Signing Day and the officials’ pledge to protect Inabanga’s fishery are powerful moments because they elevate regular, everyday activities, foster pride in local accomplishments, and forge new connections among communities. The signature moment of the event came when the entire municipal government stood in the middle of the auditorium, raised their right hands, and made a public pledge to protect local marine resources. Illegal fishing and destructive practices had been crippling the marine ecosystem, depleting fish populations, and putting the small town’s main livelihood at risk.
Just a few years ago, I found myself in a filled-to-capacity 2,000-seat auditorium in the small Filipino municipality of Inabanga, where a parade of interpretive dancers, local bands, and an oversized fish mascot helped kick off a Rare Pride campaign to restore the local fishery. Moments’s opening example, YES Prep’s “Senior Signing Day,” which takes place in a packed auditorium, was a familiar scene for me. Recognizing others, multiplying milestones, and practicing courage are three strategies the authors outline for harnessing the power of pride, but I wish they had dug a level deeper into how pride in one’s identity-pride of place, pride of community, pride of tradition-can be used to engineer peak moments. My only critique on this point, and it’s minor, is that I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into the many sources of people’s pride. (Full disclosure: Dan Heath is a former board member.) Often this means engineering moments that catalyze change. Our impact hinges on changing mindsets and inspiring people to take action. The organization I lead, Rare, helps local leaders inspire their communities to take pride in their natural resources and change their behavior to protect and conserve them. People are highly emotional, and appealing to emotions such as pride can drive us to take action. I was pleased to see Moments dedicate an entire section to the motivating power of pride. Forge transformational alliances among people-for example, implementing an educational reform effort that builds bonds between teachers and parents.
Help people understand an important truth-for example, powerfully illustrating to a poor, rural Indian village how open defecation means community members are literally eating each other’s feces every day (gruesome notion, of course, but illustrative of a problem for billions of people). Help people feel proud of accomplishing milestones-for example, improving one’s health through a nine-week “couch to 5k” exercise program. Create moments that rise above the everyday-for example, transforming the humdrum first day on a job into a memorable event. The Heath brothers offer a four-part recipe with a mnemonic device, “EPIC,” which stands for: The Power of Moments begins by outlining the elements of a “defining moment” and then, through storytelling and science, illustrates ways of making such an event extraordinary. This is precisely the point of professors Chip and Dan Heath’s new book, The Power of Moments: If we pay attention and work creatively, we have the power to turn ordinary occasions into extraordinary ones. A year before she entered sixth grade, the founders of Houston’s YES Prep were watching ESPN college football signing day when it hit them: They could create the same type of influential, awe-inspiring, memorable “moment” for their graduates. Mayra’s story is inspiring, but what’s more remarkable is that her experience was engineered. And this fall, I will be attending Connecticut College!” Six years later, Mayra stood on that same stage and made her own announcement: “Good afternoon, everybody, my name is Mayra Valle. But in that moment, among cheers and tears of joy, Mayra was inspired. Nobody in Valle’s family had gone to college. Mayra watched as the crowd responded to the seniors’ declarations with eruptions of applause. Mayra Valle was a 6th-grader when she first sat in the auditorium at the University of Houston for “Senior Signing Day,” an event where seniors from Houston’s YES Prep charter school publicly announced their college plans with all the fanfare usually reserved for All-American athletes.
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